Feature Weighted Attention—Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory Model for Change Detection in Remote Sensing Images

In remote sensing images, change detection (CD) is required in many applications, such as: resource management, urban expansion research, land management, and disaster assessment. Various deep learning-based methods were applied to satellite image analysis for change detection, yet many of them have limitations, including the overfitting problem. This research proposes the Feature Weighted Attention (FWA) in Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) method to reduce the overfitting problem and increase the performance of classification in change detection applications. Additionally, data usage and accuracy in remote sensing activities, particularly CD, can be significantly improved by a large number of training models based on BiLSTM. Normalization techniques are applied to input images in order to enhance the quality and reduce the difference in pixel value. The AlexNet and VGG16 models were used to extract useful features from the normalized images. The extracted features were then applied to the FWA-BiLSTM model, to give more weight to the unique features and increase the efficiency of classification. The attention layer selects the unique features that help to distinguish the changes in the remote sensing images. From the experimental results, it was clearly shown that the proposed FWA-BiLSTM model achieved better performance in terms of precision (93.43%), recall (93.16%), and overall accuracy (99.26%), when compared with the existing Difference-enhancement Dense-attention Convolutional Neural Network (DDCNN) model.